The News
If students are ever going to write articles in the style of newspaper stories, they need to work with models first. Here is one approach. For most of this lesson, the students are on the stage.
Preparation
A set of short news stories. Today I used these ones from Cesky rozhlas. This is an email I get each day of Czech news stories. Each story was printed at the top of a separate piece of A4.
Procedure
Ask students what's in the news at the moment. Given that Czechs won the World Championship in ice hockey the day before yesterday, this was expected to be the first thing mentioned. But no - there are elections at the weekend. And parts of the country are under flood waters. The order of stories on the right reflects this.
Fill the board with their key words.
Add more key words from the actual story titles, and/or ask them for other words they'd expect in headlines. Then tell them exactly how many words in each title and elicit exact wording. It didn't take long to do all ten headlines, even with only four students.
Soldiers _______ _______ _______ ________ floods.
Soldiers _______ clean-up _______ ________ floods.
Soldiers continue clean-up operations following floods.
Then let individuals choose an A4 sheet each. These contain the short news story and white space below for the questions. Working in pairs, they write five questions for the two texts. It doesn't matter if they don't understand all the words.
Teacher monitors the question writing.
Now, one student elicits the exact title of the article that they constructed in step 3. Then that student reads the questions to the group, who predict/guess the answers.
The teacher then reads the text aloud and the students check their answers against their predictions. The author of the questions runs the section, giving feedback.
Each student has their turn.
And that's all we had time for.
Why do I think it was an effective lesson?
There was heaps of input and output, vocabulary and grammar, stylistics in terms of telescoped newspaper headlines, discussion about current affairs and about answers to questions, a great deal of interactive work. They were happy with it all. They said so.
Variation
After step 3, time could be spent rewriting the new story titles in "normal" English, and discussing the stylistic issue of newspaper titles.
This might even be followed up with well-known, and often apocryphal, hilarious titles.